About Us
“Everybody thinks their life is weird. Most of us are right.” — Anna Gát
Welcome to Interintellect, the world’s leading salon platform!
We are a creator-led cultural center where you can attend and host fascinating conversations online and offline, and join our subscription tier for free tickets and perks.
Intellectual Orphans
A lot has been written about the dangers of the internet, but the truth is it has never been easier to find curious friends and enjoy spending time on your unique interests than it is today.
Interintellect started with the viral essay “We’re a Niche, We Just Didn’t Know” in 2019, a piece celebrating how the first fully internet native generation is reinventing discovery, finding its “tribe”, and building new communities online and offline. The old “intellectual” was dead, and the new ones were being born every day on blogs and in salons, in group chats and on Discord servers.
We built Interintellect to be the cultural center for those looking for a new way to think together.
A World of Ideas
Interintellect runs on the fuel of intellectual openness: our attendees, community members, and event hosts join us online from all over the world, or host in-person gatherings in cities everywhere. We believe in “culture peace” over culture war, and trust our hosts and salon participants who might come from any political side to enjoy complicated, enlightening discussions together.
Together, in our friendly and curious conversation spaces, we examine the great questions of literature and technology, philosophy and psychology, history and economics, every day, in numerous time zones.
Passionate Living
In a world where everything has to be optimized, having a space where the goal is simply togetherness and discovery is crucial. We like to say that the goal of a salon is itself — we are not here to “network” or show off, but to enjoy each other’s company.
Across the years, Interintellect attendees, community members, and hosts have of course found co-founders and co-authors at salons, landed their next job, or even met their future spouses and had beautiful children together. But our salons come with no agenda, whether political or professional. We exist so you can think in peace, and enjoy being yourself.
The Value of Thought
Developing a healthy, enriching intellectual life is as important to humans as having a good professional or family life. Interintellect’s mission is to make such a life available to all who need support, challenge, and community in order to achieve it.
From the earliest days, we have strived to ensure anyone — regardless of location or official job title and academic rank — can host Interintellect salons, and make money doing so, supporting public thinker careers via ticket revenue, tipping, host training, and a lively and helpful community of peers.
Whether you’re a blogger, a podcaster, a private enthusiast, or an academic looking for a wider audience, hosting Interintellect salons is a wonderful way of growing your profile as an intellectual.
A Community of Humans
Interintellect exists because human conversation can’t be replaced. We use AI internally, explore AI-assisted communication tools, and encourage our hosts to use it for research, but the salons themselves are about something AI can’t really give you: being in a room, offline or virtual, with people who showed up to think with you.
We are conscious of the immense role of human collaboration in independent thinking, and of our growing responsibility for providing spaces where people can be people, where we can be together in friendship the way only humans can.
The Future Is Conversation
Interintellect was founded in San Francisco in March 2019 by the Hungarian art philosopher and philologist Anna Gát.
Having previously founded a boundary-breaking cultural nonprofit in Budapest, and then working on screenplays, plays, and dialogue science for a decade in London and internationally, Anna felt that fictional characters had had enough support for better communication — that her expertise was best used for real people in the real world, and their needs and problems.
Since its founding, Interintellect has contributed to launching successful public intellectual careers worldwide, and welcomed some of our era’s most prominent thinkers, makers, and iconoclasts on its platform — including Francis Fukuyama, Esther Perel, Daron Acemoglu, Lea Ypi, Steven Pinker, Tyler Cowen, Anne Applebaum, Balaji Srinivasan, James Clear, Deirdre McCloskey, Sebastian Junger, Merve Emre, Dan Wang, Peter Thiel, John Ganz, Taylor Lorenz, Kyla Scanlon, Phil Klay, Aella, Eugene Wei, Jason Stanley, and many others.
Interintellect is Anna’s first technology startup. It has been supported by investments from Bloomberg Beta, Draper Associates, and O’Shaughnessy Ventures, and angels including Packy McCormick, Emmett Shear, Cyan Banister, Sahil Lavingia, Amjad Masad, Sari Azout, Ben Yeoh, Yishan Wong, Holly Liu, Matt Clifford, Saguna Goel, Swathy Prithivi, and others, as well as an Emergent Ventures grant from Tyler Cowen.
Anna Gát
Founder and CEO